Furthermore, Whitman's main problem is to project into literature the new
democratic man as he conceives him,--the man of the future, intensely
American, but in the broadest sense human and cosmopolitan; he is to
project him on a scale large enough for all uses and conditions, ignoring
the feudal and aristocratic types which have for the most part dominated
literature, and matching them with a type more copious in friendship,
charity, sympathy, religion, candor, and of equal egoism and power.
It is to exploit and enforce and illustrate this type or character that
"Leaves of Grass" is written. The poems are the drama of this new
democratic man. This type Whitman finds in himself. He does not have to
create it as Shakespeare did Hamlet or Lear; he has only to discover it
in himself. He is it and he gives it free utterance. His work is,
therefore, as he says, the poem of himself,--himself written
large,--written as upon the face of the continent, written in the types
and events he finds on all sides. He sees himself in all men, the bad as
well as the good, and he sees all men in himself. All the stupendous
claims he makes for himself he makes for others. His egotism is vicarious
and embraces the world. It is not the private individual Walt Whitman that
makes these stupendous claims for himself; it is Walt Whitman as the
spokesman of the genius of American democracy. He is not to discuss a
question. He is to outline a character, he is to incarnate a principle.
The essayist or philosopher may discuss the value of any given idea,--may
talk about it; the creative artist alone can give us the thing itself, the
concrete flesh-and-blood reality. Whitman is not only to make this survey,
to launch this criticism; he is to embody it in a living human
personality, and enable us to see the world of man and morals through its
eyes. What with the scientist, the philosopher, is thought, must be
emotion and passion with him.
Whitman promises that we shall share with him "two greatnesses, and a
third one rising inclusive and more resplendent,"--
"The greatness of Love and Democracy and the greatness of Religion"--
not merely as ideas, but as living impulses. He is to show the spirit of
absolute, impartial nature, incarnated in a human being, imbued with
love, democracy, and religion, moving amid the scenes and events of the
New World, sounding all the joys and abandonments of life, and re-reading
the oracles from the American point of view. And the utterance launched
forth is to be imbued with poetic passion.
Whitman always aims at a complete human synthesis, and leaves his reader
to make of it what he can. It is not for the poet to qualify and explain.
He seeks to reproduce his whole nature in a book,--reproduce it with all
its contradictions and carnalities, the good and the bad, the coarse and
the fine, the body and the soul,--to give free swing to himself, trusting
to natural checks and compensations to ensure a good result at last, but
not at all disturbed if you find parts of it bad as in creation itself.
His method being that of the poet, and not that of the moralist or
preacher, how shall he sort and sift, culling this virtue and that, giving
parts and fragments instead of the entire man? He must give all, not
abstractly, but concretely, synthetically.